War In Space: How The Air Force Is Preparing, And What Might Go Wrong

Loren Thompson
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The overarching goal of the Space Enterprise Vision is to implement a more resilient space posture by 2030. To get there, the Air Force will need to rewrite its doctrine for space operations, change how it trains airmen engaged in the space enterprise, and field a series of warfighting systems that were not previously deemed to be necessary. The new systems needed would enhance awareness of what is happening in space, bolster the control of space assets, and fashion a battle management system for overseeing the conduct of war in orbit.

Most of the details concerning new orbital systems are secret. But it doesn't take much reflection to see this all could be costly and time consuming. Eventually, every one of the existing national-security space constellations may need to be rearchitected, with several new constellations added for functions like command and control. And therein lies the explanation for how things might go wrong in pursuing the vision of greater resilience in space. If all-out war occurs before the redesign is effectuated, the consequences could be catastrophic.

This isn't just the result of great-power rivalry in space suddenly rearing its ugly head. As National Reconnaissance Office director Betty Sapp told Congress last year, Washington has been under-investing in national-security space for a long time. In a good year, military space -- not counting intelligence-community payloads -- gets about one day's worth of federal spending for the whole year. It will need a higher level of outlays to correct accumulated deficiencies, and there's no guarantee enemies won't attack before improvements are implemented.

Another thing that could go wrong is that the Air Force and NRO might pick the wrong approach to recapitalizing what they have. At the moment, the military space community seems enamored of commercial solutions to mission requirements such as small satellites that seem very unlikely to deliver the kind of functionality warfighters need. Aside from the physical laws limiting the applicability of small satellites to missions like missile warning, the one thing all commercial space systems have in common today is that they lack resilience.

There may be many areas where commercial products and processes can speed the delivery of more robust constellations, but it would not be smart to embrace a commercial development model in the absence of any real evidence it can meet Air Force requirements for greater resilience of space assets. Commercial space is efficient and profitable precisely because it avoids features that do not add value. But the military and intelligence communities measure value differently than the private sector does.

So even as the Air Force moves out aggressively to prepare for war in space, it probably needs to adopt an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to designing next-gen constellations. If it attempts a wholesale redesign of satellites that function well today but lack adequate resilience, it could end up with constellations that are neither resilient nor functional. That would be a bad outcome for a country that depends more on space than any other for its security and prosperity.